It completely ignores the fact that ease of access to information is a greater determinant of what people learn than existence of information.
Yes, right now it is possible to find discontents of a brand or company by searching and reading through various forums and webpages of differing quality and structure.
However, if there was an easy mnemonic like "just add .sucks to the end of a name" to find the bad things about $NAME then the game would change. It'd be easier for people to organize and oppose companies than anything else imaginable.
And that makes a huge difference. Think of how hard it was to find programming help before stack overflow. This would be a much more potent and wide-ranging way to organize information, because it can still be difficult for a novice to understand what to search for on stack overflow. This would remove even that last bit of friction.
I'm not denying that .sucks is a bold and roguish move. I am asserting that it is an effective move.
In which case they should've started up an independent service "sucks.com" where you could have "easydns.sucks.com", "hackernews.sucks.com"...ie. why involve DNS registration at all, if you're actually trying to provide a forum for people to air grievances?
The fact that the sunrise registrations are so expensive (as opposed to disallowed altogether) is an even stronger indicator that this is extortion for the purpose of profit, nothing more.
> However, if there was an easy mnemonic like "just add .sucks to the end of a name" to find the bad things about $NAME then the game would change. It'd be easier for people to organize and oppose companies than anything else imaginable.
That sounds far fetched. There would be no consistency in the kind of sites you'd get, no way for this to develop into a mnemonic. It would never become such a 'thing' that it could compete with the status quo – that you can just google for negative stuff about any company or person and get multiple, relevant results (instead of just the ravings of one particular random person who had a grievance).
... Or people will just use Google for "foo sucks". Like they do for Facebook login. It doesn't sound remotely effective unless Google goes ahead and blesses the TLD and increases rankings for such domains. Seeing as how stupid these new TLDs are, it'd be rather bad of Google to do so.
Except that the brands who could most benefit from public scrutiny/feedback will just buy up the .sucks domain and let it gather dust, the cost to them is far less than the amount they already spend on PR, damage controls and so on. So the consumer is no better off in any way.
I would suggest that a .rocks type domain would be redundant because the official .com or whatever is usually where all the positivity is. Often the owners of the .com try to manage negativity, and ensure their domain is a positive place, so another place is needed for free criticism. Im not sure many would trust a .rocks as independent.
Also, I can imagine something like an fabproduct.rocks would be a magnet for troll types and quickly descend in to a general bun fight arena.
It completely ignores the fact that ease of access to information is a greater determinant of what people learn than existence of information.
Yes, right now it is possible to find discontents of a brand or company by searching and reading through various forums and webpages of differing quality and structure.
However, if there was an easy mnemonic like "just add .sucks to the end of a name" to find the bad things about $NAME then the game would change. It'd be easier for people to organize and oppose companies than anything else imaginable.
And that makes a huge difference. Think of how hard it was to find programming help before stack overflow. This would be a much more potent and wide-ranging way to organize information, because it can still be difficult for a novice to understand what to search for on stack overflow. This would remove even that last bit of friction.
I'm not denying that .sucks is a bold and roguish move. I am asserting that it is an effective move.